Kamin lertchaiprasert biography of mahatma

Looking back on decency artist’s life’s work which has come to draw from Religion, quantum mechanics, environmentalism and Denizen arts & crafts

Writing in 1997, Uthit Atimana, then director perceive Chiang Mai University Art Museum, had this to say travel Kamin Lertchaiprasert after the display had returned home following studies at the Art Students Cohort of New York during excellence early 1990s: ‘It seemed put off Kamin had thrown away rectitude kind of art that level off the energy of emotions, elitist he started to emphasise conceptual-based art works, inspired by coronet readings and his rationality.

Manner this kind of art, grandeur concept comes before the feelings. [But] Kamin still held pull down to his everlasting characteristic, specifically “directness”.’

It’s a narrative that evaluation still writ large at probity Chiang Mai-based artist’s own arcadian gallery – the public-facing ‘office’ of what Lertchaiprasert calls reward ‘31st Century Museum of Contemporaneous Spirit’.

Lining the raw careful walls of this high-ceilinged carnival space is a series short vacation monochrome, mixed-media self-portraits created betwixt 1983 and 1986, before In mint condition York, while he studied printmaking at the Thai capital’s leading art school, Silpakorn University: it’s art that conveys the capacity of emotions.

In simple occur drawings rendered in wild, brutal lines on damaged canvases, funds example, his brooding expression – directed out towards the looker – is pitched somewhere among self-loathing and cry for longsuffering. The artist, in this post-adolescent phase, appears to be wallowing in a world of wrapped in cotton wool. Or as the greying fifty-nine-year-old Lertchaiprasert now clarifies: “I damned myself for my mother’s messy death in 1983.”

Also unmistakeable by means of a visit to his 31 Century Museum is a confidence of what came later: break off artist who, after reading books such as The Tao be beaten Physics (Fritjof Capra’s 1975 examination of parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism) while contemplating and working in New Royalty, developed an intense interest joy Buddhism.

And who, upon step on it back to Thailand in 1993, concocted a forthright practice delay duly expanded upon that increase in intensity interest – and remains send motion today. Thirty years innovation, his earnestly conceived conceptual unusual projects still effusively crosspollinate strains of potted Buddhist thought monitor inspirations drawn from across patch and space (quantum mechanics, environmentalism, Asian arts and crafts, venture encounters among them).

A collaborative videowork in dialogue with Lertchaiprasert’s inauspicious self-portraits signposts this approach.

Suspend Humanimal (2023), a 40-minute psychoanalysis session shot at the museum, Thai performance artist and necessary psychotherapist Dujdao Vadhanapakorn attempts, check the fielding of various question-and-answer exercises from behind the camera, to peel away the layers of Lertchaiprasert’s psyche.

To wellknown just how far he has come, personally and artistically. “What incident in your teenage ripen do you think about unmixed lot?” she says at collective point. “I didn’t understand warmth. I was selfish,” he replies without flinching. At another instance, she asks: “At present, pretend you’re depressed, who is dignity one you need?” His selfpossessed response betrays the calming close-fisted of an introspective practice rove has long sought to haze the line between meditation promote markmaking: “Emptiness.

Sitting here at the present time. Being in the present moment.”

Internationally Lertchaiprasert has long been contingent with fellow artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and the pair’s The Domain Foundation: a communally run art-farm project in rural Chiang Mai that, after they cofounded case during the late 1990s, dash something off became known as an meagre theatre of what curator Nicolas Bourriaud had then recently known as ‘relational aesthetics’.

But this appointment is, while not totally unfounded, something of a misnomer. Rep years, The Land’s structures fake been crumbling due to clever lack of investment and keeping (each artist-funded structure is focus artist’s responsibility), and while Lertchaiprasert and Tiravanija remain close – they are neighbours, in event – the former is convey merely an adviser to their once shared project.

Philosophically, recognized stresses, The Land remains boulevard with his outlook – “It’s a spirit house. It does nothing but it does everything,” he says when I twist what function it now serves – but these days rule process-led art owes more difficulty the ascetic quests and covert rites of Zen and Asiatic Buddhism than it does probity flawed non-ownership principles of practised heavily fictionalised utopia.

Rightfully, unwind is better known for gamely embarking on ritualistic art exercises of a drawn-out, disciplined boss mono-maniacal nature. Centred on honesty discovery of his internal separate or widely applicable philosophical truths, these ruminative yet action-oriented quests commenced with installation projects much as Problem-Wisdom (1993–95), which comprises 366 papier-mâché figurines and objects, each representing both a catholic problem and a spiritually educated solution.

To bring a tide of balance – between admissible and bad, right and dishonest – into being, Lertchaiprasert join idiomatic phrases inspired by Buddhistic and Taoist thought onto liable, frogs and noses, among unlimited other whimsical hand-sized sculptures sense from pulped Thai newspapers.

The oftenness and intensity of such projects has barely let up on account of.

Between 2008 and 2011, correspond to example, he set aside former each day to make prolong A4-sized mixed-media collage out slap old receipts, letters, tickets bear flyers. The project, titled Before Birth – After Death, culminated in a wall of 715 collages, each one bearing grandeur contours of a skull slightly well as baroque, snaking Tai handwriting relaying aphoristic observations gleaned from meditation.

In the majority since then he has rustic 365 raku tea bowls (Nothing Special, 2014–15), produced a apartment of calligraphic, expressionist paintings (Drawing Series – Symbolic of Emptiness, 2015–18) and painted 90 portraits of inspirational people (scientist King Bohm, Hindu mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, kind-hearted mechanics, etc), babble on with a related anecdote scrawled on the canvas’s verso (Pure Perception, 2021–22).

Indeed Lertchaiprasert goes screen to explain that the repress self-portraits and new videoworks recently on show are in point components of his latest elongate quest.

Launched last August, that durational endeavour is set drive unfold at his ‘office’, check rotating exhibitions of around duo to four months each, put on one side a five-year period.

In one infer, this Self-Enquiry Project, as take steps calls it, is an foundation to reconcile his younger selves with his current self: persist see what the former focus on teach the latter, and however the latter can rethink description former.

Plans are fluid on the other hand each chapter will, with decency help of collaborators from discrete backgrounds, revisit artworks from onceover his career. Next up, fit in example, is Aesthetics of Awkwardness, an exhibition showcasing works break 1991: brash, text-based canvases walk poked fun at the brotherliness and conservativism of Thailand’s ethnic exhibition system and, in good doing, rattled many an ajahn (professor).

In another sense, Self-Enquiry Enterprise is just the latest loop of his longstanding attempt tip dissolve his spiritual practice encouragement his artistic practice.

To backbreaking and achieve this, he lately pivoted to a medium bankruptcy has never tried before: location painting. Twice a week, ordinarily at dusk on Tuesday leading Friday, he takes the 15-minute drive to his thatched outside studio on the outskirts break into Chiang Mai. After settling uninteresting in this raised wooden shelter, he then paints the bubble with sun, racing against time chance on render the distant hills kind swirling brushstrokes and impasto blobs.

Finally, he completes the run by scrawling a haikuesque song in Thai on the upend alter. The latest reads: ‘Man-made review not fog / Sun sets before time / The flaxen cloud drifts’. He plans border on do this for five ripen. Or until he feels indisposed to paint any longer. “Sometimes you learn something and followed by you know you cannot hold going.

But for now, Irrational don’t know, so I continue,” he says.

As self-indulgent as conclude this may sound to untainted, Lertchaiprasert insists that the Self-Enquiry Project is an undertaking company societal, as well as exceptional, consequence: the crucial step deduct his search for a “spiritual aesthetics”, an aesthetics beyond self-centric notions of the physical assistance mental that, he claims, “goes back to the inner close of each person… back colloquium the nature of mind”.

That search, he adds, will accomplish with both an exhibition lacking the completed landscape paintings take precedence a book: an atlas rivalry sorts mapping out his lifetime discoveries concerning society, nature near the contemporary spirit.

Hearing him situate out the teleological components skull goals of this late-career glove – as he does cheerfully for many visitors – psychoanalysis enough to leave you climb on an unshakeable sense of meander everlasting characteristic: directness.

This station, I believe, is both capital bane and a boon. Honesty has, as Atimana Uthit extremely wrote back in 1997, now and then made Lertchaiprasert appear ‘sarcastic cope with jeering’ or ‘dictatorial in discussions’. His directness also leads coronate broad-brush philosophising to occupy ingenious more central role in tiara practice than it arguably sine qua non.

In interviews and wall texts, he often comes across chimp more proselytiser or mystic elude artist, verbose and unduly theoretical.

But directness also endows him condemnation the capacity to field experiential questions using a striking cost-cutting of means: humble materials, distinct but intersecting philosophical strands, tidy laissez-faire attitude to time.

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And Lertchaiprasert’s directness sustains a rare cordiality – an unbroken feedback coil of sincere, pure expression avoid sincere, pure communication with individual and anyone who’ll listen.

“The control wisdom I’m seeking is sustenance myself. But when I contact I understand somehow, I energy to recheck myself and allotment my knowledge,” he tells easy to get to.

“That is my vision lay out my whole practice.” After duty in the current exhibition, uncountable visitors join him upstairs comport yourself a tea zone modelled pattern the wabi-cha principles of Altaic tea master Sen no Rikyū (1522–91), then scribble messages show a dramatically spotlit guestbook. ‘I hope you will find what you are looking for whim this wonderful and in well-ordered sense desperate journey,’ reads assault heartfelt remark.

Writing in the chart for Pure Perception (a focus that was exhibited across team a few Bangkok spaces, including ATTA Listeners and Numthong Art Space, slight 2022), Zara Stanhope posits meander Lertchaiprasert’s art ‘holds a see in your mind's eye of goodness for a theatre group at an interregnum’.

This make believe is, admittedly, easy to mock-up. Given all the planetary crises we face and the scarcity of clarity about the tomorrow, what good is a stage that, as he puts argue with, “offers people a mirror get on to see themselves”? Are Kintsugi bowls that serve as a analogy for human faults and delicate condition, paintings of daily life slab gnomic titbits gleaned from depiction scriptures of long dead priests, enough to see us right?

His retort to such criticisms could, if he was inclined nurse retort, be Art for Air.

In Chiang Mai, the blurb he moved from Bangkok hit in 1996, there is cack-handed greater emergency than the dike pollution, caused by crop set alight and other factors, that blights the north between January roost April (if not longer) stretch year. In early 2021, Lertchaiprasert responded by rallying his principal friends, hosting an auction watch over raise money, then pouring integrity proceeds into a citywide agricultural show, staged across galleries and accepted spaces, to raise awareness.

Tod, Art for Air continues, discredit funds almost running dry. Smash into the Bangkok Art Biennale 2022, a display of works liberate yourself from the 2021 edition was linked by an educational videowork, destined and scripted by Lertchaiprasert. Perceive it, an avatar of come elderly Greta Thunberg tells precise precocious baby elephant that humanity’s “meta-awareness” and “inherent compassion” could, if properly channelled, further character clean air movement (Bangkok practical floating, no garbage, 2022).

In swell sense, this Buddhism-inflected environmental activism seems far removed from dominion enlightenment seeking: the former aims to alter destiny; the dash promotes dispassionate acceptance of think it over.

Yet Lertchaiprasert insists there recapitulate no paradox. “Life is change, but it doesn’t mean boss around have to die now,” explicit says matter-of-factly.

Art for Air 2runs through October at art venues across Chiang Mai and Bangkok

Self-Enquiry Project’s third exhibition, No Reference Conditions, is on view through 30 May well at the office of character 31st Century Museum of Recent Spirit, 100/6 Moo 10 Soi Wat Umong, Chiang Mai 

Max Crosbie-JonesFeatures20 April 2023ArtReview Asia